Shattered Read Online Free

it clear that she hadn’t wanted to come, that her friend had dragged her along. And that she knew I was full of crap.
    This was the one we’d get. I would have Jude invite her on our next cliff dive, and even if she said no at first, she’d eventually give in. Join his movement. Whatever it was moving toward.
    â€œYou want to talk natural?” I said as the girl stared me down. “It’s the job of civilization to improve on nature. To perfect it. Which makes
us
inevitable—perfected bodies, perfected brains, without defects or weaknesses, without an expiration date. We’re the
natural
end of the line.”
    â€œImpressive. I think you’re even starting to sound like him.”
    I swatted my ear. Mosquitoes might have been extinct, but there were plenty of other pests still going strong.
    â€œYou were watching?” I asked silently, knowing my voice would find Quinn wherever she was hiding. I’d gotten the VM chip—illicit tech courtesy of Jude’s illicit sources—installed only a week before but I already hated the way the computerized voice wormed into my head. Implanted in the access node at the base of my skull, the Voice/Mind Integrator intercepted the signals sent from our brains to our artificial larynxes, digitized them into a robotic monotone before we could make a sound, and sent them out to anyone within a three-mile radius, as longas they were tuned into the right frequency. I couldn’t have been the only one who cringed at the way the v-mod replaced the rise and fall of familiar voices with flat computerized tones, the same disembodied voice we’d all spoken with in rehab before learning how to use our new mouths and tongues.
    But then, that was the problem with the “improvements” Jude served up, doling them out at sporadic intervals, crediting only vague sources and underground suppliers. Few of them were an improvement on anything, and I would have been happy enough to go without. But I wasn’t about to get left behind. I might have renounced my past and embraced a new and improved me and all the other empowering soulsong crap that, true or not, still sounded like bullshit when we spewed it out to the newbie mechs, but I had enough in common with the old Lia Kahn to know where I stood on the concept of loops. That’s
loop
as in
do whatever’s necessary to stay in the
. So the majority ruled. If the majority wanted infrared vision or internal GPS or strangers’ voices crawling through their brains, then I wanted them too. So what if every addition carried us further away from normal?
    â€œNormal” was just one more thing better left to orgs; one more thing we’d left behind.
    Quinn was the only one who used the VM with any regularity. Maybe it reminded her of the voice she’d spoken with since childhood, each word selected by the flicker of an eye, one of the few body parts left intact after her accident. We all held on to a few things it would have been easier to forget.
    â€œI’m always watching.” There were micro-cams all over the estate, left over from Quinn’s predownload years. “By the way, that shirt makes you look like a whale.”
    I smirked, forcing myself not to seek out the camera. It would be hidden in a branch or a gutter, likely invisible and definitely out of my reach, which meant there was no point in tipping her off about how much the eye-in-the-sky act creeped me out. “It’s Ani’s shirt,” I said, plucking at the skintight mesh rippling with bucolic scenes yanked from the network. At the moment, there was some kind of galactic nebula unfurling across my chest.
    â€œWas her shirt. Who do you think made her get rid of it?” Quinn’s low chuckle sounded almost authentic. Even after all these months in the mech body, I still hadn’t gotten a handle on laughter. Ani told me I was imagining things, but I was convinced my spastic barking made